1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a robot capable of dealing with a heavily-loaded load despite its small shape and capable of realizing various patterns of manipulation operations with a high degree of accuracy.
2. Discussion of the Background
An industrial robot is furnished with a hand device for performing various kinds of work, and a gripper type hand device has been widely used as the hand device. As the configuration of the gripper type hand device, for example, the configuration of swingably supporting a pair of flat plates with one shaft or parallel two shafts to make the flat plates perform opening and closing operations is given. The gripper type hand device generally has high strength to be able to deal with a heavy load. Consequently, the gripper type hand device obtains a high evaluation in terms of the reliability thereof, combined with the simple configuration thereof. However, since the gripper type hand device has the simple configuration, the gripper type hand device has a disadvantage of being inferior in the applicability to the work treating various goods.
Accordingly, the configuration of having a multi-fingered multi-jointed structure similarly to a human being and arranging motors directly to finger joints for the purpose of manipulating small-sized light parts skillfully is proposed in FIGS. 5 and 6 of Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-335010. According to the configuration, because the mechanism thereof is simple in addition to the capability of using the outputs of the motors as joint torque directly, the maintenance thereof, such as the exchange of the motors, is also easy.